The extrodinary power of hypnosis and hypnotherapy

Hypnosis

Have you ever been so absorbed in a great movie that you forget about everything going on around you? Perhaps it was even so exciting that you were sitting on the edge of your seat and almost believed the characters and story were real. Maybe even your heart beat faster, you perspired a little or even jumped as the ‘bad guy’ came out of nowhere.

If so, you will have experienced hypnosis. Although often clouded in mystery it is in reality an everyday experience.

Hypnosis is an altered state of consciousness where your attention is focused internally. In this ‘trance’ state your subconscious mind is more open to suggestion as the critical factor of your conscious mind is bypassed.

This enables changes to be made at a deeper subconscious level.

Hypnotherapy

Hypnotherapy makes use of the state of hypnosis to help people make both psychological and physical changes at the subconscious level.

To be effective it needs to be undertaken with a qualified practitioner who can use a number of techniques including direct and indirect suggestion, regression, metaphor, visualisation, psychoanalysis to name just a few.

There is now much scientific evidence for the effectiveness of hypnotherapy in helping a variety of conditions. So much so that it is accepted as a useful method of treatment by many leading healthcare organisations including the British Medical Association, the American Medical Association, the NHS and even private medical organisations such as Bupa.

How can hypnotherapy help?

Our minds have many similar characteristics to computers. Our brain is the computer hardware and our mind contains the software programmes on which it functions.

When our mind has positive programmes everything is well. However we can also pick up negative or disempowering programmes which can be as destructive as computer viruses.

Hypnotherapy can be a very effective method to help re-programme your mind to achieve your goals. It is not the only method however and we have the ability at the Clinical and Medical Hypnotherapy Centre to use a number of mind programming techniques to help you bring about rapid change.

The importance of negative and positive programming

Basic hypnotherapy has often relied mainly on attempting to re-programme a clients mind with positive suggestions and visualisation to achieve success. However whilst this is effective is not always completely effective for everybody as it does not take account of destructive mind programmes or ‘mind viruses’ that might be present.

Imagine your bought a new software programme for your computer. No matter how wonderful and advanced it is, unless you clean your computer of software viruses the new software programme will be unable to function properly if at all.

The same applies to the human mind. We need to rid ourselves of self-sabotaging mind viruses.
So for example, if somebody wanted to lose weight, we would look at the subconscious programmes that are preventing them from making progress and then disabling these in addition to installing new positive programmes.

Advanced hypnotherapy - personalised sessions

In your first session you will undertake a psychological profile exercise so we can ascertain the most appropriate form of therapy and suggestion for you.

For example some people are more resistant to direct suggestion than others so we employ techniques as appropriate. Also we all see the world in different ways. Some people are more auditory than visual. Some use other senses more. Asking an auditory person to visualise or picture something can be difficult and not so effective.

So rather than visualisation we use a more effective technique called ‘sensualisation’ which uses a powerful combination of all the senses tailored specifically to each client.

These are just a few of the personalised techniques we use to ensure you obtain maximum benefit from your sessions.

The mind-body connection

The mind and body are very closely linked and each can effect the other. For example if we are embarrassed this has a physical effect on the body - our face glows red. Similarly under stressful psychological conditions such as an exam our muscles tighten and we may sweat.

These are known as pyscho-somatic responses.

In medical hypnotherapy we can use this to our benefit. In a state of hypnotic trance we can give instructions to our subconscious mind not only to make psychological changes but also physical changes. For example using hypnotherapy we can reduce pain and help boost the immune system to fight infections.

Neuro-conditioning

Another state of the art technology we use is neuro-programming. This is a very powerful system of sound therapy and brainwave entrainment which makes your hypnotherapy sessions far more effective. Not only does it guide you effortlessly into a deep state of relaxation but it also has a direct impact on your neuro-activity, breaking up negative neuro-patterns and helping to create more beneficial neuro-connections.

Very few hypnotherapists offer this technology and we are the first practice in the UK to offer this particular blend of technology and therapy.

For more details visit the neuro-conditioning section.